For A Daughter, Forever Ago
by percychased
Summary: A rather violent gust caused the chipped white window to fly open, banging against the wall and leaving fissures in all directions. Looking back on that exact moment, Dominique would think it was a warning on what they'd find next. Angst.


_**May 2nd, 2017 - For A Daughter, Forever Ago**_

_With every small disaster_

_I'll let the waters still_

_Take me away to some place real_

Dominique is fifteen when it happens.

Fifteen, and she's off owling boys and putting on makeup and rolling her eyes at her father as he makes really bad jokes. She only sometimes listens to her mother, and usually forgets to say 'I love you,' when she leaves. But her mother knows that, right?

Louis is only a toddler.

He was their lucky child, conceived when their mother thought she couldn't have any more children. He was the youngest of the Weasley's, curly blonde hair and a wide, toothy smile. He'd just learned to talk, too. Sometimes, when she was annoyed with Victoire and well, she couldn't talk to her _dad_, could she? She would talk to Louis. He was a baby, he had no clue what she was saying. But it felt good to rant and to rave about things and know they'd be in confident hands.

Their dad had been taking his 'girls' out to Muggle London for the day. It was a weekend all Hogwarts students got off; the Victory Day weekend, the Ministry called it. A four-day weekend the students went home. It was Victoire's seventeenth birthday, and she'd wanted to go shopping. It was hardly in character for their mother to deny shopping, but she'd insisted they'd go, because Louis was fussy and they would go for a swim.

It was a wonderful day; Dominique got a beautiful new top from a Muggle boutique, and Victoire got a lovely skirt and a pair of shoes that made her tall frame look even more graceful. Dominique has to remind herself not to be petty and jealous, because Victoire's just born like that.

They'd been excited to show their mother what they'd gotten, sure she'd exclaim over it, taper it with her wand, and hand it back to them, before adjusting it once more and fixing it so that the colour was _just right. _Both of her daughters got their love of shopping from her.

The sky was overcast, with a few rays of sun peeking through. The waves crashed against the shore, that familiar drone they'd all gotten used to after living their lives at Shell Cottage.

None of them bother to look at the water. It's a sight they're all used to, and now, the only time they actually marvel at it is during the sunset, not during midday when the dull, grey waves were rolling onto the shore almost violently, like they were protesting something.

Dominique thought nothing into it. In retrospect, maybe she should have, but right then, her feet were aching from a day of walking and all she wanted was a nice dinner and to sleep before she had to return to Hogwarts in two days. She wasn't looking forward to it.

"Fleur?" asked Bill.

The house was silent, except for the ever-present noise of the water colliding with the rough sand.

"She probably went to Grandma's house, Dad. Although it isn't like her to not leave a note," shrugged Victoire.

A rather violent gust caused the chipped white window to fly open, banging against the wall and leaving fissures in all directions.

Looking back on that exact moment, Dominique would think it was a warning on what they'd find next.

She turned away and ignored the flash of pink floating in the water she saw out of the corner of her eye - a toy lost in the water, probably. Where was her mother?

* * *

Dominique brushed out her graying hair and turned away from the mirror, sucking in a low breath. Her country home was small and quaint, and while it was quiet with her only daughter, it was comfortable.

She put her hands against her head and massaged her temple. She remembers so much it _hurts. _The pain radiates from the inside out, crushing her chest and even now, all these years, she dips into a grief so deep and so powerful she can't even think, speak, hear.

The mirror bothers her, and she shoots a quick spell at it, painting the surface black.

Vic understands. She's older now, too, but she doesn't handle things the same thing Dominique does. She immerses herself in her career, in her work, so much that they're running out of work to give her, and her marriage is running out of love, as well.

She knows the ropes snapped a long time ago, but the strands that held the few left together were starting to disintegrate.

"Mama?" asks Marie. "Mama… qu'est-ce que?"

"Non, Marie," Dominique struggles to control herself. She hates saying no to her daughter, her beautiful, only girl, but right now was just one of those bad times…

"D'accord, Mama," the girl - no, woman, now, sighs, and busies herself, causing another flash of guilt to shoot throughout her. She couldn't even be a proper mother to her daughter because she was still caught up in the events of the past.

She wonders how her brother's doing, all the way up in Northern Ireland with his children. His lungs are still weak, after all this time; the waves crashed over him and the water, oh, _the water. _Louis' lungs collapsed and even now, thousands of kilometres away, across the Channel, she remembers his breathing, how he could barely walk without breathing heavily, his chest heaving.

And how looking at his blonde hair and grey-blue eyes made her want to scream, to cry, to leave.

The mirror is blackened, and she sinks into the couch. She's her father's daughter, always has been. Even now.

He loved her, Victoire, Louis. But his wife - he loved her with every single thread of his being.

Love confuses her, it puzzles her. Dominique doesn't understand. She has never been _in love - _wanting to wake up to the same face every morning for a century, loving someone and something so much that you aren't just you anymore, you are them and they are you.

Her father was never a violent man - it was not in his nature.

Neither is she.

So she lies on her back, the familiar dents of the cracks on the ceiling almost comforting. The highs and the lows, the ups and the downs. It is almost like her, except for the fact that the highs, the highs in her life, were much more rare. Her daughter, her little country house. Her grown niece Anna, who comes to visit sometimes. Her little Welsh Corgi, a happy, cute little dog.

Her lows, like the ones on the ceiling, dig deep. They are her, and her grief, and her family that she doesn't see and the ones she's never met. That is the rest of her teenage years, and the days that she spent with a pillow on top of her head, trying to get rid of the noise crashing against the shore. The _noise, _the _noise_.

The silent noise of her father that seemed to hang about that house, even now. His grief is as vivid as the noise of the waves that never stop _crashing, crashing, crashing _in her head; him, red hair like hers, those days near the full moon where he couldn't even _look _at his children, because he was so angry. Her father never hurt them. Ever.

But pain isn't always physical. If anyone knows that, it's the Weasley's.

Dominique knows her father would take a million of Greyback's attack for their mother. He'd face the Dark Lord, again, for her.

He would do anything for her, desperation, and maybe that's the part that hurts the most. It almost made her glad he passed when he did - but what hell of a person did that make her? Finding her own freedom in sin. But Victoire and Louis, they agreed. He was better now, gone and happy. They all agreed that they'd rather him gone and happy than hurting, much more than they could ever understand. Right then, even death had shown the heart that it hadn't had previously.

By the age of twenty-two, twenty, and eight years old, Victoire, Dominique, and Louis were orphans.

The marriage of Teddy Lupin and Victoire happened a year later, and the few years before Louis started Hogwarts, he lived with her, in that meager little flat in London because she refused to go back to that house, where the noise against the shore took away her mother, and in the years after, by extension, they took her father, too.

The two Muggle jobs she worked took care of the bills, and Rose was her roommate for a while, too. Her cousin was lovely, the picturesque version of a war hero's daughter. Happy, energetic, with the support she needed, with only the sky as her limit.

Her daughter comes back into the room, cleansing the black from the mirror and not asking any questions. Marie plaits her long red hair, playing with ends for a moment before disappearing back into the kitchen.

When Dominique sits up, she catches a glance of her reflection in the mirror.

It is ironic the descendant of a Veela would loathe mirrors. But she does.

Dominique catches the wrinkles forming at the corners of her eyes, and her forehead, and the dull colour of her copper hair, with silver glittering in it. And she feels so _old _and so _heavy, _not physically heavy, like there's an invisible weight on her shoulders, dragging and pushing her along. Almost as if gravity affected her more than most.

But most of all, she notices the almond shape of her eyes, the point of her nose, the shape of her face. She was the perfect combination of her parents; the hair and freckles of her father, and facial features almost identical to her mother.

That's exactly what she sees - her mother. The water, the waves, crashing in the blue eyes, struggling and drowning. The peak of her nose, the peak of her father's grief, and the times when she most needed her mother as a young woman trying to find her way in the world. The tilt of her chin, and the tilted way her mother would lean when she carried Louis around the house.

Sometimes it hurts too much to think, to breathe, to carry on.

But she tried. She made a new life in the farmland of France for them. She tried to become the mother she had needed as a young adult for her own daughter.

Because if Dominique Weasley knew anything, it was that she, herself, would always need a mother.

* * *

a/n - I've been writing a lot of deaths and angst lately, have you noticed? For the Quidditch League Comp, using 1, 7, and 13. Also for Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, category Potions and using the prompts language (French), safety, and nature (in a figurative sense). For Sherlock Competition, part 2, #1. How was it?

Also - kudos to whoever can figure out which artist is the inspiration for the title of this fic!


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